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Utilization of Size-Tunable Hollow Silica Nanospheres for Building Thermal Insulation Applications

Abstract

Hollow silica nanospheres (HSNS) have been the subject of intense studies as a possible building block that may successfully bring about nano insulation materials (NIM) with substantially reduced thermal conductivity. The reported thermal conductivity values of the HSNS are currently ranged between 20 and 90 mW/(mK). In this work, we have investigated the thermal properties of HSNS as a function of the corresponding structural pa-rameters such as inner pore diameter, porosity, shell thickness, and size of the silica nanoparticles constituting the shell of HSNS. HSNS with sizes less than 100 nm was specifically synthesized in an attempt to lower the expressed thermal conductivity values to be below 20 mW/(mK), which may be used as a potential target to-wards superinsulation materials used in building applications. Furthermore, synthetic approaches to gain in-sights into the mechanism and formation of HSNS, i.e., the influence of reaction parameters on the structural characteristics of HSNS, have been thoroughly discussed in this work.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

  • Sohrab Alex Mofid
  • Bjørn Petter Jelle
  • Xinpeng Zhao
  • Tao Gao
  • Mathieu Grandcolas
  • Bridget Cunningham
  • Serina Ng
  • Ronggui Yang

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Community / Architecture, Materials and Structures
  • SINTEF Industry / Materials and Nanotechnology
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • University of Colorado at Boulder
  • University of Vermont

Year

2020

Published in

Journal of Building Engineering

ISSN

2352-7102

Volume

31

Page(s)

1 - 9

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository